


O I Long To Feel Your Arms Around Me

by Zigzagwanderer



Series: And The Wanting Comes In Waves [1]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: AccidentalSex25, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - College/University
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-01
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2019-05-31 21:35:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15128300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zigzagwanderer/pseuds/Zigzagwanderer
Summary: I am sorry that this bears so little resemblance to what was required for your Accidental Sex collection! I really am useless at stuff like prompts, but you were kind enough to ask me to play, so here is something anyway.xxxxxxBasically, in this, a student, Bill Graham, is studying erotic poetry for his degree. And his professor is Dr H Lecter.





	O I Long To Feel Your Arms Around Me

**Author's Note:**

> As some of you know, 'The Chapel Cycle' is the book of poems written by Mr William Graham, poet, in one of my other things,' called 'Hold Me Up To The Flame.' I think my AU's are starting to overlap!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It is hot. It is June. Term has ended. It is one week before their final Modern Literature exam.

“But it sounds so…unsexy,” Margot is blank-faced. “I mean, aren’t the two lovers in the poem simply tickling one another?”  
Bill’s study partner has struggled with interpreting their set texts all semester. 

“Didn’t you read that philosophy stuff? Descartes. Aristotle. Tickling…it’s subversive. It’s about abandonment, escalation. Danger.” Bill rubs at his jaw, feeling awkward, but also goddamn frustrated. “And it’s a form of stimulation that has to involve more than just the individual. I think in the right circumstances that could be pretty…erotic.” 

Bill feels sorry for her. Genuinely. She doesn’t understand. She cannot slot this part of _‘The Chapel Cycle’_ into her senses, and feel the weight of it inside, forcing her open, in the way that he can.  
Cannot feel the rhythmic nerve-pull of the words, pulsing and echoing, even hours after reading them.

All Margot can do is appear to be attentive and copy down everything Dr Lecter says to them during his private, after-college tutorials. 

Bill is attentive, too. Listening. Looking. Obsessively so, but not because he doesn’t understand.  
He does understand. He really does.  
Every potent syllable of every terrifying line. 

Erotic doesn’t begin to cover it.  
Billy-boy has been hard beneath his desk for nearly every one of his Mod. Lit. classes. 

And as for the tutorials themselves, he both dreads them and longs for them. They are ruining him. He lives for them.  
And this is to be the last. 

It is _unendurably_ hot. 

Dr Lecter removes his glasses and wipes the sweat from the crest of his cheekbones with a handkerchief.  
He has had to remove his jacket. He has had to fold back his cuffs.  
Bill wonders at what incendiary temperature his teacher would decide that he was justified in removing his waistcoat. Or undoing the top button of his shirt.  
Bill wants to see. He wants to see everything. He needs to, before it is all over. 

Dr Lecter’s home is an ivy-covered townhouse, a mile from the campus. He lives with a catatonic sister who has an elegant, air-conditioned suite on the upper floor. Modified to the standards of a private hospital, or so somebody has told everybody in their year.

But it means that the study group boils below in a long, still room that is further insulated with shelf upon shelf of precious, printed paper.  
Bill dreams about touching Dr Lecter’s books. They are like destinations chalked up on a departure board. He cannot afford to travel to any of them. Not on the scholarship that finally made up his mind about going back to school.

But his thoughts do journey. As do his eyes. They covet and slip stickily from spine to spine, skimming over what he desires.  
And they always end up straying onto Dr Lecter, whom Bill desires even more than his fucking gorgeous library. 

“Quite so, Bill,” Dr Lecter nods his soft hair over his forehead. Brushes it back. Bill cannot stop himself from adoring. “And the sense of attack which separates pleasure from pleasure-pain is present;  
_“‘Abrading rhythm, push again/again, against that place which once was only my own, my only secret finger-bed/ bed of my body, unmade, made holy; gift me again/the spearing pain of saints.’”_.

Margot remains faintly puzzled.  
Bill watches Dr Lecter’s mouth. He would pay twice what these extra classes are costing him for just these recitations alone.  
He devours them, and regurgitates them later, spitting them out wetly upon his own hands, into his own palms; palming himself with them as he uses recollection to further oil illusion. 

A discreet alarm bell chimes somewhere on one of the floors above.  
Dr Lecter puts down the book he is using and excuses himself for a moment.  
Bill worries. Dr Lecter is beyond beautiful. But he is also quiet, and kind of sad.

“I keep meaning to ask you,” Margot leans across. “William Graham,” she waves her first edition about carelessly. The author’s name is embossed on the fine cover. “This incomprehensible poet. That’s your name, isn’t it? Bill-short-for-William Graham? Any relation? Seeing as you’re such an avid fan of his dirty ditties?”  
“Just a namesake.” Bill shrugs. “Coincidence. Didn’t you say you were leaving early today?”  
“God. Yes.” Margot gets her notes together. “Can you apologise for me?” She flutters a guilty glance towards the ceiling. “I know dear old Hannibal tries so hard to hammer all this exotic smut into my boring little brain, but Alana’s reserved a table at _Le Chiffre_.”  
“He’s not old,” Bill mutters. “He’s only got a couple years on the clock more than me.”  
“Darling, your clock must be terribly wonky then.”  
“Just six years difference, Margot. That’s nothing.”  
“How I loathe baby-faced intellectuals like you,” she laughs and pecks his cheek. “I’d ask if you’ll be alright on your own with the professor, but I think we both know the answer to that, don’t we?” She winks as she leaves. “You poor, pining boy. Give him a goodbye kiss from me?” 

Bill shoos her out. 

He knows a lot more than Hannibal Lecter’s age.  
He knows, of course, that he is a devoted brother. But also, that he is a published essayist. A supporter of local charities. A board member of the local arts centre. A gourmand.  
That he keeps fit by running. Sometimes around the university grounds. Sometimes, through the park.  
He knows that sometimes, the professor runs at night, sleekly piercing the drops of light that fall from lonely streetlamps. 

And the main thing that Bill knows is that Dr Lecter has not had a romantic interest in his life since he started work at the university.  
Four years earlier.

“Oh,” Dr Lecter comes back into the room and closes the door. “We seem to have lost Ms Verger?”  
“It’s her girlfriend’s birthday.” Bill stands up. “If you’re busy, I can go too?”  
“No. My sleeping beauty is well. Just a bad dream.” For a small fragment of time, there is nothing but sorrow to the man.  
Then he resumes his usual place on the edge of his desk.  
“Please. Stay. Unless you too have a date?” Dr Lecter has, unsurprisingly, a very sweet, serious smile. Bill has catalogued how little it is used. And how long his legs are, and how the muscles of them move beneath the dark blue serge he favours.  
“Uh. No. I’m not seeing _anyone_ ,” Bill knows he has said it too pointedly. 

Or maybe not.

Dr Lecter pauses, and leaves the textbook alone.  
“And I guess I’ve enjoyed you too much. I mean them.” Bill flushes. “I mean this. It’s been amazing. Discussing Graham’s works with you. And Baudelaire, of course. And Hilst.”  
Dr Lecter studies his own hands. “You have needed the…grace of these words, yes?”

Bill has wandered in a tiny circle. To the corner table with its picture of a young girl in a pinafore at its centre. Back to the desk.  
He is all nerve. And sweat. And restless determination. 

“I remember one of our conversations,” Dr Lecter adds, watching Bill. “You told me that you were a policeman? Back home?”  
Bill nods, painfully. “Five years in an ugly job. In an ugly world.”  
“Difficult too. For a young man that clearly appreciates the…sensuous.”  
“Yes, it was.” Bill says softly. “And yes, I do.”

The heat has a sound, in the still air; a presence.  
It is an ocean, washing over and over them, heavy and richly generative, and it pounds in their ears and anoints them with salt-water. 

Upper lip. Brow. The small of the back. 

But Bill is certain that it is not just the warm waves of the weather that so ripple the air.  
It is _want_.  
And he is also more certain, now, that it is not just his alone.

The books whisper stories around the two of them.  
Old tales. Sagas. Romances. Variations on a theme.

Because there is only one tale that matters, in the end. 

“And I…I will miss…your insights.” Dr Lecter finally states. He looks down, then back up, resolutely. He is someone who has faced loss before. “Your company has been incomparable.”  
“I know.” Bill takes a step closer to his teacher. “I feel the same.”  
“Between ourselves, Bill, you are gifted enough not to have required these sessions. I have perhaps, been selfish in allowing you to attend.”  
“I couldn’t have stayed away.”  
Bill is being honest. He is almost thigh to thigh with Dr Hannibal Lecter. What else is there now, except to tell the truth?

“Is there anything I can do for you, Bill?” The voice is steady, but very soft. “In the spirit of a connection soon to be severed?”  
Bill takes the light glance and holds it. Waits until it catches into something more. Dr Lecter’s eyes are chestnut, but they are growing darker; they are charring. The blistering swell is pulling Bill closer and closer to their shore. 

“I wondered,” Bill says slowly. His right hand runs along the edge of the desk, corners sharply, and runs again, stopping short of where the contour of Dr Lecter’s hip breaks the line of it. “I wondered about the difference. Between _plaisir_ , and _jouissance_? Tickling. Titillation. Torture. I’d better be sure I’ve got it all clear. For the exam.”

Dr Lecter frowns. He was, perhaps, looking for a less scholarly request. But Bill is paying for an education, and so Dr Lecter reaches for his well-notated copy of the infamous Graham verses and starts to stir through the pages.

His disappointment is Bill’s joy; Bill leans in a little.  
“Actually…I was hoping…I mean, could you…demonstrate it for me? Please?”

He can hear his own breathing change. He can hear Dr Lecter’s breathing change.  
Dr Lecter puts down the book. It is a loud, final heartbeat in the room.  
It signals the death of Bill’s college life.  
It is the ending of a specific relationship.  
Not teacher, nor pupil, now. Not guru, nor disciple.

They are free to look, now, so they look.  
Dr Lecter has a mouth that has a hidden cruelty to it. Will has a bow of petulance atop his.

They change.

They become two flawed, whole men, looking at each other in a narrow, book-choked room. Men who do not have all the answers, nor all the questions.  
Men who want each other. Who can no longer stand not to touch each other.

Dr Lecter moves quickly, he slides from the desk and unbalances Bill, he pushes his body against Bill’s body until they stumble across the mossy rectangle of the rug and Bill is braced hard against the wooden rungs of the library ladder.  
The hurt of it startles Bill.  
He pants out the pained, longing breath that he has been holding onto since spring break. They had two weeks apart, then, and Bill _knew_.

Two weeks on the beach with vacuous varsity types, two whole weeks without these tutorials and the odd restrained coffee in the campus cafeteria, where he may have accidentally had to share a table with Dr Lecter, after accidentally crossing his path. 

So Bill _knows_.  
Not what he’s doing, but why. 

Dr Lecter, though, is unsmiling. He is wary.  
Yet he does not apologise. He is, perhaps, teaching Bill his final lesson.  
He runs the knuckles of both hands up the bones of Bill’s chest. The action is deft and unexpected.  
He uses exactly the right amount of pressure; Bill’s whole body jerks. Dr Lecter dips his thumbs into the well at the base of Bill’s throat.

Where it is moist.  
He presses, a little.  
They share a breath, in, and out.

Then Dr Lecter brushes down again, then up, again. Then down to Bill’s beltline, lingering, easing his fingers beneath the fabric.  
Then up, right up, under Bill’s armpits, forcing his way up, teasing at the sticky hair he finds there.  
Bill writhes, uncoordinated. Oversensitive.  
He shows his teeth; he cannot tell if he is snickering or snarling. 

At the final pass, at the very top of Bill’s flaming pillar of a neck, Dr Lecter’s long hands suddenly butterfly outward, and he spreads his fingers to encompass the rounding edges of Bill’s ribcage.  
Bill’s heartbeat batters violently within.

Dr Lecter is holding him possessively, he pulls Bill to him by the waist.  
Long enough for Bill to feel what the contact is doing to the professor.

They stare at one another. 

Dr Lecter stops. 

The demonstration could be over, if Bill wants it to be, it can end there; no harm done, no boundary unforgivably crossed.  
Tickling is what the set text is about, after all.

But, then, Bill slowly raises his arms, until he can lock his fists around the smooth, stiff struts of the ladder.  
And he lowers his lids and he says, _“more.”_

Dr Lecter finds Bill’s nipples; the cheap, thin t-shirt is no defence at all.  
He uses only the tips of his thumbs and his fingers. Playing, up, over, around.  
It is unsatisfying, it is designed to be so.  
Bill is shivering, squirming to get away, to get nearer, to make it a firmer touch or no touch at all.  
“Fuck,” Bill chokes out the lovely, unpoetic word.  
“Hm,” Dr Lecter tilts his head to one side. “I’m not sure we have the time,” he says, gravely. “The tutorial is almost over. You may have to settle for my hands alone, on this occasion.”

His nails scrape. The sparking sensations join up. Bill has points of rapture across his body that he did not know existed, were connected, his entire surface is spasming, his cock is hardening and his eyes are stinging.  
And Bill’s position is uncomfortable, he is at a disadvantage, pinned beneath those feathering, flicking fingertips. 

Dr Lecter starts to rub a little harder.

There is certainly a sense of threat. Dr Lecter is stronger that Billy-boy has realised. He looms over Bill and exhales on his neck, sending cold, purposeful impulses directly to Bill’s tailbone and lower, so that each breath curls underneath him, and he feels himself a wet, a fluid creature, caged in the cradle of his clothing.  
Hannibal noses up into Bill’s curls, and brushes the ridge of his bottom lip across the underside of Bill’s jaw.  
It is dizzying.  
An onslaught.  
Bill is glassing over, and he judders, almost constantly, ungainly, wrong-footed and alarmed at his own responses. 

He asked for something. And now he is getting it.

Dr Lecter pulls Bill’s damp t-shirt off and over his head, roughly.  
“I have wanted this for months,” he grips Bill’s shoulders, and bites delicately across the ridge of revealed breastbone.  
He licks at Bill’s nipples, cools them and skims across them again.  
It is maddening. Bill has never felt less like laughing. 

Then Dr Lecter stops.  
Again.

Bill shudders, his flesh spiking into peaks and prickles, and his pulse picks up, racing ahead of even his own imagination.  
“What?”  
Dr Lecter crumples up Bill’s t-shirt in both of his hands and he takes a step back.  
“No. This is wrong.”  
“What?” Bill swallows, again, afraid.  
“This.”  
_“Please...”_ He cannot finish the sentence with a name, a title. Bill doesn’t know how to address the man in front of him, now. 

The man whose hands have spoiled him, whose spit is on his skin. 

The professor is flushed, too. “This is not how I want you.”  
Bill waits.  
“Follow me, if you would.”  
And Hannibal Lecter leads Bill through the house, through the corridors and stairwells.  
Although he is a stranger there, Bill knows the place well; it is like the man whose hand he is holding, it is beautiful, and quiet, and sad. 

The bedroom is almost empty. In one corner is a desk. In the other, a displayed suit of samurai armour.  
The walls are violet, a constant dusk to dream by. Bill walks straight over to the bed. The sheets are soft and vellum-white.  
The door is left open. Dr Lecter lingers there for a moment, listening for an interruption that will never come.

And at that, Bill holds out his hand. He would give Hannibal _anything_ , in this moment.  
He is _aching_ to be anything, in this moment.  
A memory, to be made. A brief consolation. 

He does not wish to be a regret, but if he must be, then he will earn that shame honourably. 

Their fingers meet, and knot, undoing and knotting again.  
Bill is kissed; he kisses back. Hannibal presses his clothed body against Bill, who is dazed and half naked in his arms.  
“God. God. This can’t be real.”  
“If it is not, my sweet, clever boy, then I have died from the agony of not having you.”  
“God. You fucking _have_ me, you really do. You always have. Since day one.” Bill’s fingers trace the tendons at the back of Hannibal’s neck, as he works over Bill’s throat with his lips, with his teeth. His hands tremble up through the silk. “Please. Hannibal. Have me. Have. Me.”  
All sage thoughts have fled. He could come from these kisses alone. 

But he wants to open the book, not just marvel at the binding.  
“Can I..?” He fumbles at the front of Hannibal’s waistcoat.  
Hannibal moves back enough and watches through dishevelled hair.  
Bill unbuttons while Hannibal regards him.  
Bill’s concentration. His clumsiness. 

“In the quadrangle. Last week,” Hannibal confesses, “you were hurrying by. All alone. I watched you from the hallway doors. You were far away, unearthly. Your hair was tangled from the summer storm.”  
Hannibal flattens his palm against the front of Will. “You were soaked. Your jeans were stuck to you. Here. I could hardly reply to my companion. I did not want to discuss the new translation of Klingo’s _Chrysillis_ , I wanted to run after you and ask you to accompany me to some sordid motel downtown. So I could strip you of your wet things and fuck you.”  
Bill clenches Hannibal’s tie to himself. His eyes are wide.  
“I would’ve gone with you. H-Hannibal. Believe me.” 

They finish taking off Hannibal’s shirt together.  
Then the rest of their things. They don’t speak.  
Bill lies down, and Hannibal kneels over him.  
“I am a very poor seducer, Bill.” Hannibal murmurs, glancing once, over his shoulder. “My dearest Mischa...My circumstances…my responsibilities have conspired to curtail my experience.”  
“Then we can both learn,” Bill says, simply, and pulls Hannibal down next to him. 

And so, they take each other to bed.  
To be with someone you love. It is a joy.  
The pleasure of it, is a joy.  
To pleasure the one you love, is a joy.

Hannibal licks Bill’s body, artlessly. He has craved it, and now he can consume it, joyfully, and so he does. Bill’s nipples slip into his mouth, belonging to his tongue. He glides one hand down Bill’s flank, praising the smoothness, the sharp curve of bone, the damp curls, until he cannot delay or deny himself any longer and he nudges his hand underneath Bill’s cock. 

Bill, for all his wordiness, is incoherent.  
Nothing in his past encounters, in any poem he has ever read, has prepared him for this.  
Pleasure. Love. Bill is drowning in it all. The slow, deep wetness of it.

After the prodding, punishing manhandling of earlier, Hannibal is languorous, his eyes dimmed and mouth red.  
He eases Bill’s legs further apart and strokes, and strokes and strokes.  
Backwards, to make Bill shy forward, nervous of the intrusion, then sliding under again to pull, and drag his hand to the very end of Bill’s endurance.  
Rhythm drugs Bill, he is swooping and swimming with it, hips tugging forward and back, anticipating a little, in the end, as he catches the tempo of Hannibal’s adoration, his muscles tensing a little too, which makes it even better, when Hannibal grips a little tighter, pushes in a little more.

Wanting it to end, never wanting it to end; an endless pendulum of pleasure, back and forth. Hannibal savours the sweat that is dripping off them both. 

Bill shakes his head. Wants Hannibal’s tongue in his mouth.  
Wants Hannibal’s cock in his hand.  
He isn’t even sure how to hold it, but he finds Hannibal so very stiff, so very slippery, shivering at the simplest of touches, that nothing he does displeases. Hannibal makes a sound, and Bill echoes it back.

Bill cranes his neck to bury his face into Hannibal’s shoulder, kissing, then gnawing almost mindlessly into the meat there. They are so uncomfortably placed that he is numb in places and cramping in others, but neither seems capable of anything but continuation.  
“Can you…do it…faster..?”  
“No. Not yet,” Hannibal whispers, and looks Bill straight in the eye. He looks so delighted, blushing and boyish, that Bill grins and nods softly and submits to more. More tight fingering, more loose fisting, all of it wet, all of it love. 

He matches Hannibal’s enthusiasm with a surprisingly successful, incompetent attempt of his own. 

“Sweet, clever boy,” Hannibal moans, at last, and Bill is now more thoroughly squeezed and skewered. He pants and whines into Hannibal’s ear, promising to devote himself after the exams to practicing nothing but this, promising to improve, promising that they will fuck in every way they can, over and again until they can fuck one another perfectly, in every possible way, and at the bold sincerity of Bill’s words, Hannibal comes, arching, all over them both. 

Over Bill’s hands and body and Bill’s own swollen cock. Bill is so shocked by the surge of it, the fluid melting of Hannibal over him, the gift of it, the rich smell and joy of it, that he comes too, blinded by wonder. 

It is the realisation, all over again, the awakening, all over again, that a single letter, multiplied, can make a word, can have meaning; a simple touch, repeated, from one to another, when given meaning, can be a consummation, can so easily connect one heart to another.

And Hannibal makes all of Bill’s promises back to him, and they hold each other through the drowning and the death of it, and they mean every single word that they say.

Eventually, they are obliged to get up and wipe themselves down. 

Bill returns the flannel and sits back down on the bed.  
“I ought to say right now that I think I might be kind of in love with you.”

Hannibal finishes drying his hands.  
He looks stricken. 

Bill sees his face and cannot move. He might be the biggest fool on campus. 

But Hannibal is kneeling at his feet.  
“And I ought to say that I have agreed to spend the next two months on Crete, helping to edit a biography of Odysseus Elytis.”  
“What?”  
“I am so sorry. Mischa is going to a medical facility on the shore of the Aegean, so it seemed as good a place as any to be heartbroken.”  
He is an angel, Bill decides, as Hannibal lifts up his face. “I convince myself, Bill, that change does her good; the differences in light, in the scent of the air…I suppose it is a pointless pilgrimage…”

He kisses Bill again, frowning. “Oh. And I love you. Of course. How could I not love you? Impossible thought.”

Bills puts his forehead against Hannibal’s. “Two months.”  
“I can afford to take you as my guest…but no.”  
Bill has shaken his head at that suggestion. Margot doesn’t understand how sour charity can taste, but Hannibal clearly does.  
“Well, I could defer our departure.”  
Bill bites at a nail. He looks at Hannibal’s body. It is like some goddamn statue in the state museum, he is goddamn _perfect_ , but he is also pale except for a tan that ends at collar-line and wrists. Hannibal is indoors so much. Responsible to his pupils. His sister. His work. 

The sun would do him good. 

“Thanks, I just can’t ask that.” Bill leans again, defeated, into Hannibal. “Look, we have a week.”  
“You have exams, Bill.”  
“We can try? We can try to see each other a little?”  
“Bill.” Hannibal says quietly. “Can you tell me one thing?”  
Bill nods.  
“These tutorials. Have you attended them because they were necessary to your understanding of the works?”

There is a silence then. It is answer enough.

Hannibal brings out a wooden box from under the bed. A child’s trinket-box, perhaps. Tiny planes soar eternally across the faded blue lid. Inside are banded piles of banknotes.  
“Here are all the fees that you have paid me. Take them back.”  
Bill regards the money.  
“Please forgive me? I let you come here each week because, to be vulgar, I wanted you. Take what is yours.”  
They kiss. Hannibal runs his hands up and down Bill’s thighs.  
“And take me too, Bill. Please. I have waited so long for you to happen by.”  
Bill regards Hannibal.  
“Mischa.” He says the name slowly, and it feels like family. “She won’t mind me crashing your vacation?”  
“I do not think so. I speak to her about you often. I feel like she was the first to know how I felt.”

Bill nods.  
The muscle in his thigh twitches as Hannibal pinches him, requiring a definitive answer.  
“Uh, yeah," Bill grins. "Looks like I’d better dig out my copy of _’The Sovereign Sun’_ , then."  
Hannibal smiles with relief.  
"And a couple pairs of shorts," Bill adds.  
"If you think it necessary." Hannibal makes a growling noise. "I assure you that the villa we will be renting is very private."  
He slides his hands under Bill's knees. The skin is tender there, and soft. 

It tickles.  
It actually goddamn tickles.

Hannibal pulls Bill’s legs apart and starts to kiss right along the inside of his thigh.

That tickles even more. 

“There is a little more refund due.” Hannibal murmurs, biting and sucking, torturing and licking. “Would you settle for a cheque? Or could I persuade you to suffer a further demonstration? In the interests of your education?” 

"I'm in your hands, Dr Lecter," Bill says, and suddenly, joyfully, he starts to laugh.


End file.
